The most important misunderstanding is thatscience confirmed teenagers are innately unable to think as well as adults. No matter how much we train the teenage brain, it fails to make mature decisions because the brain can only develop according to one’s biological age.
First and foremost, scientists have never found any causation that teenagers are innately prone to make bad decisions.
Second, the same brain makes different decisions according to different environmental cues; that is, if teens are in an environment that induces risky actions typical in adolescence, they of course show more risky behaviors and different actions than adult. For example, teenagers may use drugs because their peers do. We could of course hypothesize that this is because teenagers are generally vulnerable to that temptation. However, can we eliminate a possibility that the society have been failing to teach teenagers mature behaviors compared to the society in the past, when many teenagers were treated as adults (like when human beings could only live for 50 years)? If this is the case, we cannot only blame the teenage behaviors on the teenage brain.
Overall, many people assume that the teenage brain is inherently less capable of making mature decisions than the adult brain because most newspaper articles and speakers for disciplining children do not mention the importance of social contexts in adolescent behaviors. It may lead the society to placing teenagers under more extreme supervisions of parents and the society, preventing adolescents from making their own life decisions.
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Your first paragraphy reminds me of Vygotsky's theory "zone of proximal development," in which a person can't perform cognitive tasks that is beyond their zone of proximal devopment. So in other words, if the person brain isn't ready for something, then it just can't perform certain tasks. I believe this is true, but with your myth it is saying that teenage minds are immature and unable to make adult decisions. I think this is very untrue because I know so many teenagers who are more responsible to most adults I know. So I think all brains develop different, and that you can't generalize something like that about all teenagers.
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